All Chapters of Step Daddy's Lakeside Sin : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

(Millie POV)I threw up at seven fifteen on Friday morning in the upstairs bathroom while Adrianna was downstairs boiling water. It was going to have to be. The throwing-up was the throwing-up I had heard about in books and movies, the throwing-up that was real, that was happening to my own body, the kind of throwing-up that happens when your body has decided it is going to do something about your secrets whether your mouth is ready or not. I had been pretending since Sunday that my stomach was behaving. I had been pretending because I had been taking small bites of Adrianna's grapefruit halves and rinsing my mouth with cold water between bites, and Adrianna had been too busy locking doors to look at my face, and Richard had been too busy cooking eggs to see the way I was chewing. But the baby had heard me. The baby had heard me lie to the grapefruit halves for ten days. The baby had gotten tired of waiting for me to admit she was there and had decided to make her presence known in th

(Henrietta POV)The suitcase sat open on the narrow bed like a mouth waiting to be filled. Henrietta stood over it in the dim yellow light of the single bulb, folding the last of her summer dresses with careful, deliberate hands. Soft cotton ones that still smelled faintly of woodsmoke, river water, and her grandmother’s homemade lavender soap. She pressed each piece flat, smoothing out wrinkles that would only return the moment she closed the lid. Outside the small window the valley had already begun to darken. No streetlights. No distant glow of a city. Just the low purple bruise of dusk settling over the hills and the occasional bark of a dog that belonged to someone three properties away.It has been one year. That was how long she had been gone. One full year of weak signal bars that flickered like dying fireflies, of handwritten letters that took weeks to arrive, of her grandmother’s stubborn insistence that “the city will still be there when you’re ready, child.” She had come

(Richard POV)I have not said my son's name out loud for fourteen years. I have said it in writing. I have said it in the back of the notebooks I keep in the upstairs drawer in the closet of my bedroom. I have said it at the kitchen table in the late hours Adrianna was asleep, with a pen at a piece of paper, in a way that has not yet healed anything. I have not said my son's name out loud because saying my son's name out loud has been, for fourteen years, the only thing I have been afraid of being a man about.Tonight I am sitting on the edge of Adrianna's bed in her guest room and Adrianna is asleep in her master bedroom and Millie is across the hall in my bedroom and the baby is in Millie and Vivienne is in the kitchen garbage and Mrs. Halbrook is watering her hostas and I am about to say my son's name out loud for the first time in fourteen years to a woman who is twenty-three years old and who has not yet learned the worst things about me. I will say it to her because she is going

(Millie POV)I did not know he was at the office.I did not know he was at the office because Richard did not always tell me when he was at the office. Richard had not been in the habit of telling me when he was at the office for days. Richard had been at the office the way Richard had always been at the office, and sometimes late, sometimes early, sometimes in the upstairs study pretending to take a phone call, sometimes out for the afternoon for a meeting. This Wednesday afternoon I was at Mercury Café and I was sitting at the corner table by the window and I was drinking my lavender latte and I was not eating my toast because Adrianna had been making too many grapefruit halves and the toast at Mercury had been the small un-eaten thing I had been ordering for three years without ever finishing. The toast was an alibi.I was looking at my toast when I saw them.Across the street. Across the street from Mercury was the small green-awning building that had been the law firm of Mr. Heal

(Millie POV)The house was quiet in the way that only came after something had already broken. Adrianna had gone to bed early, or at least shut herself inside the guest room and turned the lock. The sound of that lock clicking had become familiar. I stood in the upstairs hallway for a long time, one hand resting on the wall, listening to the low hum of the air conditioner and the distant sound of Richard moving around in the study. I had been avoiding him since I told my mother. Avoiding the look in his eyes. Avoiding the questions that I wasn’t ready to ask and the answers I was simply terrified to hear.But tonight I couldn’t avoid it anymore. I pushed the study door open without knocking.Richard was standing by the window with his back to me, sleeves rolled up, the lamp on the desk casting a warm circle of light that didn’t quite reach him. He turned the moment the door opened, as if he had been waiting for me. His face looked older in the half-light. Tired and careful.“Millie.”